Session Two of the Software Preservation Network Forum (Google folder here), held at Georgia State University on August 1, 2016, focused on the activities of institutions already collecting and providing access to software. Despite the differences in institutional practice and use cases, the three presenters highlighted a number of common themes and challenges.

The first presenter to speak was Glynn Edwards, Head of Technical Services for Special Collections at Stanford University. Edwards spoke largely about the question of metadata for software collections, identifying the need for standard vocabularies based on the metadata that is useful for access, discovery, delivery (e.g. in emulation-as-a-service platforms), and preservation of software titles. Stanford’s own experiences with software collections such as theCabrinety Collection and theRichard Bartle papers demonstrate a need for new metadata schemas for describing software; MODS, used within Stanford’s digital repository, has proven insufficient. Edwards highlighted other work going on in this area, including the Game Metadata and Citation Project (GAMECIP), which cultural heritage institutions can and should coordinate with in defining metadata schemas for software. Regarding access, Edwards reiterated Henry Lowood’s point from earlier in the Forum that Stanford defaults to reading room-only access to software titles in its collections, reaching out to rights holders to gain permission for broader distribution models such as worldwide internet access.

Glynn was followed by Doug White, Computer Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). White and his team at NIST maintain the National Software Reference Library (NSRL), a software collection initially designed to aid law enforcement in forensic investigations. The NSRL publishes metadata about titles as the NIST Standard Reference Data Set, and has developed other tools such as SWIDTags, which can aid in software ID tagging. White discussed some of the potential applications of the NSRL for cultural heritage, including in identification and cataloging of software titles. White stressed that the NSRL is open to collaborating with other collections and to providing access to titles in the NSRL collection to researchers.

The session’s final presenter was Paula Jabloner, Director of Digital Collections at the Computer History Museum (CHM). The CHM has long collected physical artifacts and is beginning to actively process a historic software collection acquired over many years. In some cases, the CHM has received software titles with perpetual licensing agreements rather than deeds of gift. The Museum’s newCenter for Software History will explore software through a curatorial lens while expanding access and preservation activities. The CHM has alsoopenly released source code for several key pieces of early software, including MS-DOS, early Photoshop, Apple II DOS, and MacPaint. Some of these source code collections have had hundreds of thousands of page views, but it’s not yet known what users are doing with the code. Jabloner stressed that the CHM also has issues describing software with existing metadata schemas, and that shared schemas to enable interoperability of metadata are much needed.

Following the individual sessions—and Jabloner’s comment that the Computer History Museum’s internal use cases for software collections (exhibits, curatorial research, etc.) are much clearer at this point than public or general access use cases—participants broke out in groups to begin brainstorming and developing use cases for software collections based on their institutional contexts, as well as to examine issues of metadata in context.

As a whole, Session Two of the SPN Forum was extremely informative and interesting. The need for standard metadata practice surrounding software was clearly demonstrated, as was the need to collaborate with other communities working on similar questions around software, such as game preservation and forensic investigation. Collecting institutions may also need to rethink their models of ownership and rights transfer for software titles (as the Computer History Museum has done) by utilizing perpetual licensing. Finally, the session made clear that we as archivists, librarians, and curators need a much clearer idea of who our users are and what the use cases are for software collections—a project that will be continued by Software Preservation Network volunteers in the months to come!

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Tim Walsh is the Digital Archivist at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Quebec, where he develops and oversees workflows for processing, preservation, and access of born-digital materials, including computer-aided design (CAD) and other software-dependent file formats.

The Software Preservation Network (SPN) 2016 Forum was held Monday, August 1st, 2016 on the Georgia State University campus in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. The SPN 2016 Forum theme, “Action Research: Empowering the Cultural Heritage Community and Mapping Out Next Steps for Software Preservation” reflected the mission of the Software Preservation Network (SPN) — to solicit community input and build consensus around next steps for preserving software at scale as part of the larger effort to ensure long-term access to digital objects. Over the next few weeks, bloggERS will be publishing a series of posts about the Forum, written by attendees. This blog post series speaks to the core beliefs of the Software Preservation Network team:

Reflection is essential to our practice. Our Volunteer Blog Post Authors represent a team of Reflective Practitioners — helping us to derive and articulate insights from their embodied experience as Forum attendees and participants.

The practice of critical reflection around software preservation must incorporate members from complementary domains to actively participate in a coordinated effort to develop a sustainable, national strategy for proprietary software licensing and collection — pulling heavily from the collective, embodied experience and expertise of researcher-practitioners in law, archives, libraries, museums, software development and other domains.

Community participation was key to the Forum’s success and proposals were invited on topics including:

Current collaborations/consortial efforts

Collective software licensing approaches

Preservation efforts

Emulated or virtualized access options

Organizational structures that have worked for other multi-institutional initiatives that may work for software preservation

Our call for proposals received an enthusiastic response — so much so, that we embarked on a happy experiment to push the conversation forward, and closer to actionable next steps. We asked our participants to scrap their original proposal and work together in teams to identify overlaps/intersections across projects AND design an activity to facilitate meaningful engagement among attendees. They all said yes — to ambiguity, to experimentation, and to dedicating more of their time and energy towards making the Forum a valuable experience. The final Forum schedule can be found here, but for a preview of what you’ll be hearing about over the course of this blog post series, below is a list of sessions and their participants:

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY

SESSION 1 – Legal and Policy Aspects of Software Preservation

Henry Lowood – Stanford University

Zach Vowell – Software Preservation Network

SESSION 2 – Current Collecting, Processing of and Access to Legacy Software

Glynn Edwards – Stanford University

Jason Scott – Internet Archive

Doug White – National Software Reference Library

Paula Jabloner – Computer History Museum

SESSION 3 – Research and Data on Software Preservation

Micah Altman – Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jessica Meyerson & Zach Vowell – Software Preservation Network

BRAINSTORMING BREAK

SESSION 4 – Partnerships Forming Around Software Preservation

Aliza Leventhal – Sasaki Associates

Tim Walsh – Canadian Centre for Architecture

Nicholas Taylor – Stanford University

Ryder Kouba – The American University in Cairo

SESSION 5 – Community Roadmapping

As you read the posts in this series, if you are inspired to get involved with this growing community of dedicated colleagues, there are several ways to dive in:

Submit a use case. We ask, for the sake of easier analysis/comparison (finding common themes across use cases) that you follow this general structure.

We are scheduled to send out a version of our software preservation community roadmap on these listservs — please let us know if there are other groups of folks that might be interested.

Sign up to participate in the working groups that have been formed around the community roadmap.

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Zach Vowell has worked with born-digital collection material since 2007, and has served as Digital Archivist at at the Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo since 2013. At Cal Poly, he is co-primary investigator of the IMLS-funded Software Preservation Network project, and leads digital preservation efforts within Kennedy Library’s Special Collections. Zach has long recognized the need to strategically preserve software in order to provide long-term access to archival collections.

Jessica Meyerson is Digital Archivist at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin, where she is responsible for building infrastructure to support digital preservation and access. Jessica earned her M.S.I.S. from the University of Texas at Austin with specializations in digital archives and preservation. She is Co-PI on the IMLS-funded Software Preservation Network – a role that allows her to promote the essential role of software preservation in responsible and effective digital stewardship.